


unnatural occurrences

by tsimtsum



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Multi, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-24 04:23:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19716142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsimtsum/pseuds/tsimtsum
Summary: A boy crossed paths with a monster, and the monster climbed into the boy’s head. It whispered to the boy, it wrapped its hands around the boy’s heart, and it squeezed. The boy did what he was told. The boy raised an army that would fight by dying, he hunted a girl and her friends. The boy lay on shattered tile, bleeding from one hundred places. His world went dark, but his story did not end...life goes on in hawkins.





	1. prognosis

**Author's Note:**

> Mentions of child abuse. Spoilers for season 3.
> 
> Idea for the Back to the Future argument from comedian Ed Byrne.

Patricia Hawthorne dies in her garden. Her tomatoes are doing poorly this year, and the young man at the plant nursery told her that she could try growing basil and garlic to keep away the pests. Beads of perspiration roll down the back of her neck and black soil lines her palms. She doesn’t hear the fence gate opening or the footsteps behind her. When the boy with curly blond hair, wearing a leather jacket in this heat, presses a chloroformed rag to her mouth, she barely has time to struggle before going limp in his arms. He carries her to his car, and she isn’t dead yet, but soon she will wish that she had died in that moment. Her final days will be nothing but pain.

***

Gary and Kathleen Anderson are walking their dog, Rocky, in the pale evening sunlight. Kathleen holds a small notebook, writing a packing list for their trip to Gary’s sister’s family on July 4th. Gary struggles to keep Rocky from sprinting after squirrels in the woods. Kathleen wants to know if they’ll need to bring their own towels, or if Gary’s sister will let them borrow hers. Gary doesn’t know, and Kathleen sighs, and soon they’re arguing. They barely notice the young couple walking in the other direction, the light-haired boy and the dark-haired girl, until it’s too late, and their lifeless bodies lie in the trunk of the car speeding east. Rocky runs after them, barking, his leash trailing behind him, but the driver accelerates, and the dog loses the car before the next intersection.

***

Brian McGrath’s mother told him to come straight home after baseball, but Dennis brought his birthday money to practice and the whole team goes to Starcourt Mall for burgers and ice cream. It’s late when the chain on Brian’s bicycle breaks on his way home, and he knows the guy who pulls over and asks if Brian needs a ride. He’s a high school senior, graduated now, with a single silver earring and a smile that makes every girl giggle and toss her hair over her shoulder. Brian has tried practicing that smile in the bathroom mirror at home, but he can’t quite get it right. So he gets in the car with this guy, who is older and much cooler than Brian, and his mother will spend the night dialing his friends’ phone numbers, trying to find her son.

***

A boy crossed paths with a monster, and the monster climbed into the boy’s head. It whispered to the boy, it wrapped its hands around the boy’s heart, and it squeezed. The boy did what he was told. The boy raised an army that would fight by dying, he hunted a girl and her friends. The boy lay on shattered tile, bleeding from one hundred places. His world went dark, but his story did not end.

***

A man and a woman wearing identical black suits sit next to Billy’s bed when he wakes. They tell Billy that he can call them Tom and Jean. They want to be on a first-name basis because they will be spending a lot of time together, the three of them, and there is no need for formalities here. Tom and Jean do not tell Billy what agency they work for, but they ask him a lot of questions, and they have more questions for every one of Billy’s answers. Doctors and nurses enter the room to take Billy’s vitals and change his IV bags. Billy has three more surgeries after waking, and every time he returns to the room, Tom and Jean are waiting.

Billy has questions too, and they let him ask, and they answer some of them. One day they bring a man with pale eyes who has his own questions and who gives Billy more answers. One day they bring Max, who has been part of all this since the Hargrove-Mayfields arrived in Hawkins, and when she sees him, she cries. 

Billy tells Tom and Jean the truth. He tells them where he was headed on the night he lost control of himself, and he tells them everything that happened since. He remembers all of it. He gives them a list of names, the people he brought to the steel mill. He told those people not to be afraid. Billy tells Tom and Jean about the girl, whose abilities they already know of. The monster hated her, and so Billy hated her, too. The monster wanted to kill her, and Billy tried as hard as he could, but then she looked at Billy, and she said to him, I know you. And the monster tore Billy apart.

He never lies to Tom and Jean, but there are questions they do not ask, and so there are answers he does not give. Sometimes, when the monster spoke to him, it sounded like Neil. Sometimes it sounded like his mother. 

***

On Billy Hargrove’s last day in the hospital, the girl they call Eleven brings him a stuffed tiger. She puts it next to the wilted daisies from Max and the tulips from Joyce Byers. 

“I bought this in the gift shop downstairs,” she says. “I did not steal it.” Billy picks up the tiger and runs his thumb along the seam on its back.

“That kinda sounds like something someone would say if they did steal it,” he tells her.

“No. I can’t steal things anymore.” Her finger flex against her thighs, and she doesn’t say anything else, but he understands. He was in her head, and she was in his, and there are no secrets in this room.

“Thank you,” he says, looking into the tiger’s black button eyes.

“You are welcome.”

A nurse walks in with a clipboard and a smile to check Billy’s vitals for the seventh time that day. This will be the last time, she promises him, she just needs to get the final paperwork, and then he’ll be free to go. After she leaves, Eleven sits on the edge of his bed with the best posture Billy’s ever seen in a fourteen-year-old. 

“You cannot go home,” she tells him.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but that’s sorta what’s happening right now,” Billy says. Eleven stares at him. She might not be able to move things with her mind, but she still has eyes that can look to the very center of a person’s being.

“Is he still there?” 

The defenses, the insults, the anger and denials arrive in Billy’s mouth as if summoned by an unconscious, automatic mechanism that belonged to the Billy of before. He swallows them back, forcefully, feeling them scrape against the soft lining of his throat. There is no point in lying to her. He stares at the fluorescent light fixture on the ceiling until green shapes float through his vision.

“Yes.”

“Then you cannot go back there,” she says, like it’s easy, like it’s been that easy for his entire life.

“I can’t stay here,” Billy says. “Where else am I supposed to go?”

“Come with me. I’m living at Will’s. His mom and his brother are really nice.” Joyce Byers had sat in Billy’s hospital room the day after Tom and Jean left. She brought flowers and she didn’t mind that Billy didn’t want to talk. Billy once pushed Jonathan Byers into a locker, but Jonathan had just picked up his books and walked away. Billy has heard stories about how Jonathan can fight. Everyone says that he went crazy when his little brother went missing. Billy might have agreed with them, then, but he knows new things about crazy now. 

“That’s a small house,” he says, because once he almost killed Steve Harrington in that house. He doesn’t know if the Billy from before and the Billy with the monster in his head were that different.

“There is room for you there,” Eleven tells him. No one has ever looked at Billy the way that she’s looking at him right now. After he signs the nurse’s paperwork and changes into a shirt and jeans from the hospital’s donation box, he follows Eleven into the parking lot, where Joyce Byers is waiting in her car.

***

A boy crossed paths with a monster, and the monster showed the boy a different world, a world that looked like the one the boy called home. The monster told the boy its plans because the boy was very important to those plans, and the monster needed the boy. The monster needed to grow and to build, and it showed the boy things that the boy had never seen before. The monster told the boy what to do, but the boy did not understand what was happening to him. The boy thought that he had lost his mind. He didn’t always know which world he walked in, the world of monster, or his own. 

***

Billy sleeps on the couch. Will and Jonathan share a room and Eleven, who likes to be called El, has her own. Joyce gives Billy sheets, a blanket, and pillows.

“I’m sorry it’s not a bed,” she tells him. “But I just bought it a couple months ago from the Erwalds’ yard sale, and I think it’s in pretty good condition.” He thanks her. He thanks Jonathan for handing him a plate of meat and potatoes, and he thanks Will, who suggests that he name the stuffed tiger Sarah, after Sarah Bowman from Day of the Dead. Billy sleeps with Sarah that night.

Max and Lucas arrive two days later, carrying Billy’s stuff in boxes. Lucas watches him with pity, and Billy tastes panic, bitter on his tongue, because he has nightmares about Neil hitting him, but he has more nightmares about people finding out. 

Then Lucas says, “I’m glad you didn’t die. Um,” and Billy relaxes because he can’t stop people from knowing about the time he tried to kill them all. El and Will leave with Max and Lucas, El riding on the back of Max’s bike, and Jonathan helps Billy unpack his things.

“The Clash,” Jonathan says, pulling out Combat Rock. “I have this album. Will loves it.” Billy nods. In his two days here, Billy’s learned that Jonathan likes music and photography, and he had been planning on taking a year off before college to make more money. No one sleeps that much in this house, and whenever someone pads into the kitchen in the middle of the night, careful not to wake Billy, Jonathan is always a few moments behind. He makes hot chocolate or tears open a package of ice cream bars and sits with his mother, or his brother, or El, and Billy watches through his eyelashes and listens to passing fragments of their conversations. Jonathan is always the last to go back to bed, rinsing the dishes in the sink and flicking off the light. 

Now Jonathan stacks Billy’s music on the mantel. “You can use my stereo, if you want,” he says. Max and Lucas hadn’t been able to carry Billy’s with them, but Max said this with a look that meant Neil had been involved. “Seriously,” Jonathan says, “whenever you want. It’s, uh, pretty cheap, so it’s probably not as good quality as yours, but. Still.”

“I’m not Nancy Wheeler or Steve Harrington,” Billy says. “I bet my speakers are even shittier than yours.” Jonathan stares at him, and Billy scratches the back of his neck, suddenly cold. He’s still not used to his short hair, longer than it was when he woke up in the hospital with a shaved head, but nothing like before. “But, uh, yeah. Okay. Thanks.” Jonathan nods and rips open the next box.

***

In the final weeks of summer, the kids who will soon enter Hawkins High as freshmen spend all their time together. Sometimes Max and Lucas will peel off from the group to bike through the streets in the evenings and early mornings. Max breaks up with Lucas one more time, but they get back together the next day. Sometimes when Will wants to be alone, he walks for hours through the woods, learning the shapes of the trees and the sounds of animals in the bushes. Sometimes it’s just two or three of them, at the arcade or poking around the shops on Main Street, now that Starcourt is gone. But usually it’s all of them together, in the Wheelers’ basement or the Hendersons’ living room, watching TV or blasting music until Mrs. Wheeler asks them to turn it down, please. At the Sinclairs’ they tolerate Erica because she’s one of them now, technically, and she actually knows a lot about all kinds of things. They avoid the Byerses’ for a while after Billy moves in because he’s always there.

“His car got wrecked, remember?”

“Oh yeah, thanks Mike, I almost forgot about that time when he tried to turn us into roadkill.”

“Shut up, Lucas. Besides, where’s he going to go?”

None of them have an answer to that. And Max tells them that Billy is fine now, good even, very different than they all remember. And Will agrees with her, which makes Mike and Lucas exchange a surprised glance. 

“He is not dangerous. He will not hurt us,” says El, and that’s good enough for everyone.

Still, they shuffle into Will’s house, glancing at Billy out of the corners of their eyes, stumbling into each other as they kick off their shoes and immediately huddling together once they slam the door to Will’s room behind them.

“Was he reading?”

“I don’t know, I couldn’t see, Dustin’s huge head was in my way.”

“He was reading. It was like a textbook or something.”

“What? Gross.”

“It was a cookbook,” Will says. They all stare at him, and he shrugs. “He’s been reading them lately. I think it’s the first time they’ve been opened in like, ten years. Jonathan usually just makes stuff up when he cooks.” There’s a knock at the door, and they fall silent. Billy opens it, a crack, staying in the hallway. 

“Hey. Um. I don’t know if you guys are staying for dinner, but if you are, I’m making a broccoli cheddar casserole. Or a cheeseburger macaroni skillet, maybe, but I don’t know if there’s any macaroni. So. Yeah. That’s all.” He closes the door behind him and silence rings throughout the room. Mike mouths, Casserole? Max hits him in the arm.

They do end up staying for dinner, and Nancy comes over too, arriving with Jonathan just as Joyce is wiping down extra chairs from the shed and Mike is pulling plates off of the cabinet’s top shelf. Max and Lucas are making a salad at the counter, elbowing each other in the ribs and arguing about how many tomatoes to include. El and Dustin are setting the table and pouring glasses of water and soda. Dustin knocks over half a bottle of Fanta and the kitchen erupts into even greater chaos. In the middle of it all is Billy, standing at the stove and asking Max if the casserole needs more salt. Will spots Nancy and Jonathan staring, open-mouthed, and he smiles.

“Hi,” he says. “Billy made dinner.”

Dinner includes two more spilled glasses and an argument about why Marty McFly’s parents didn’t recognize their son as the guy they had known in high school, an argument that ends with Dustin and Lucas pulling Mike and Max back down into their seats before someone throws a punch. Everyone compliments Billy on the food, multiple times, and Billy smiles and looks at his plate, ears red, saying nothing.

Billy insists on washing the dishes by himself, and Jonathan and Nancy disappear into the bedroom, closing the door, which makes Will wrinkle his nose. Max and Lucas slip off into the night, raising their middle fingers to the catcalls and whistles that follow them out the door. Dustin has to leave soon after because his aunt is visiting the next day, and his mom needs help getting the guest room ready. Joyce goes into the backyard to smoke, leaving Mike and Will alone in the dark living room, lit only by the glow from the TV. They watch Billy at the sink, elbows-deep in soap suds, humming a tune they don’t recognize.

“It’s so weird,” Mike whispers. “It’s like he’s more normal now than he was before he got possessed.”

“He’s not,” Will says. Mike turns to look at him, sitting on the sofa with his arms wrapped around his legs, resting his chin on his knees.

“How do you know?” Mike asks. “He seems more normal to me. Remember when he tried to beat up Lucas in that kitchen? Remember Steve?”

“I remember what it’s like to have the Mind Flayer in your head,” Will says, so quiet that Mike can barely hear him over the water running. “Nothing is normal after that.”

“Oh, right. Sorry,” Mike says. “I wasn’t thinking about that.”

“I’m always thinking about it,” says Will.

***

A boy crossed paths with a monster, and the monster fought the boy, and the boy lost.

***

There is a man named Murray Bauman, and Billy does not know where he lives, but he appears at the Byerses two or three times a week, installing more locks on the doors and reading foreign language newspapers at the kitchen table. Sometimes he falls asleep like that, and Billy will wake in the middle of the night to Murray inspecting the latches on the windows. 

“Joyce’s security is appallingly bad,” Murray says, without turning around. “Frankly, it’s a miracle that she lived here for as long as she did without anything happening. You don’t need a lot of money to protect yourself. It’s all about taking the appropriate precautions. Anyone could do it. Most people are just too stupid or lazy, but Joyce Byers is neither of those things.”

Billy doesn’t know who Murray Bauman is, but sometimes it can feel like the entire fucking town is moving in with the Byerses. 

***

Nancy Wheeler pulls up to the house one day, driving the car that was her parents’ graduation present. She was supposed to start at Northwestern in less than a month, but she defered, citing personal reasons. She’s wearing a blue dress, and when she opens the front door Billy looks up from the recipe for vegetable quiche that he’s reading. 

“Jonathan’s at work,” he tells her. She holds her wrist in her hand, twisting a gold bracelet around and around.

“I know that,” she says. “I’m here for you.” He stares at her, his index finger resting on the list of ingredients. Onion. Mushroom. Olive oil. Three eggs. She sighs, crossing her arms over her stomach. “I thought you might want to go out for a bit,” she says. “Haven’t you been here since you left the hospital? We can go somewhere, if you want, or you can just come with me. I’m supposed to be running errands.” And so Billy follows her into her car, and he rolls down the window and watches the passing houses as if seeing them for the first time. 

They go to the post office for stamps and the hardware store for paint. “We’re redoing the upstairs bathroom,” Nancy explains. “It’s my dad’s newest project.” They go to RadioShack for batteries, and the kid behind the register is a student at Hawkins High. Billy doesn’t know his name, but he remembers that the kid had his locker close to Billy’s. He stares at Billy the entire time, even while he’s ringing up Nancy, and Billy looks at the blue carpet and tries to avoid fidgeting. The worst of his scars are hidden under his clothes, but still the kid stares. Back in the car Nancy sighs as she deposits the plastic bag in the backseat.

“He was so rude, wasn’t he? Sorry.” Billy shrugs. Nancy starts the car and checks her mirrors before turning to back out of the parking spot. She puts her hand on the back of Billy’s headrest, and he can smell her perfume. “There were rumors that you had died. It was just that no one saw you for so long, but then the Post published the official list of the deceased from that night, and you weren’t on it, obviously.”

“Maybe I should’ve been.” Billy doesn’t realize that he’s talking until he’s already said it. He looks away from Nancy so that she can’t meet his eyes. They drive in silence. The air that whips through the car smells like summer, and Billy fights off a shiver. He’s always cold now. He lets the neat lawns become a blur of rosebushes and white fences in his vision. When Nancy slows the car to stop in the middle of the road, Billy stares, blinking, his eyes unseeing at first.

They’re at Steve Harrington’s house, the driveway empty and the curtains drawn over the windows. The last time Billy talked to Steve Harrington ended with Billy breaking a plate over Steve’s skull and Max smashing a bat between Billy’s legs. Billy turns to Nancy, who’s looking past him at the house.

“Relax, we’re not going inside,” she says. “I don’t even think he’s home.” They sit there, the street quiet, the engine a low hum. Nancy looks at the house, so Billy does, too. It’s big, set back from the road, with massive trees growing in the front yard. Billy thinks about what it would be like to grow up in that house, to find familiarity in that door and those windows. Billy wonders what Steve’s parents are like, if they fight every day, if his dad ever hits his mom. Billy doesn’t think his family is like most families, but he has no way of knowing, not really, what any other family is like behind closed doors. The closest he’s gotten to another family is now, with the Byerses, but even he knows that the Byers family is far from normal. Nancy tugs at her bracelet again, and Billy wonders if she’s thinking about Steve. Everyone knows that she’s the one who ended the relationship. Becca Meyers tried to start a rumor that Nancy cheated on Steve, and that he broke up with her, but Steve put an end to it quickly, before it could spread. All of that happened during the period when Billy was avoiding Steve as much as possible while still being in the same building as him, and he doesn’t remember much of it now.

Nancy shifts gears and they jolt forward, rolling slowly down the road and away from the Harrington house with all its mysteries. They pass two stop signs before Nancy speaks again.

“My best friend died at that house.”

She pauses, swallowing, and Billy knows he needs to say something, but his mind buzzes with static. He presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “When?”

“It was a year before you moved here, the first time that everything happened. I’m not sure how much you know about all of that.” She looks at Billy, and he shrugs.

“Enough.”

“Her name was Barb Holland, and I made her come with me when Steve invited me over because I wanted to see him so badly, but I was too nervous to go alone. She tried to get out of it like a million times, but I kept begging her to come. And she hated it there. She was obviously having the worst time, but at that point I was just thinking about Steve and what we were going to do that night, and I thought I would make it up to her the next day. And I never saw her again.” Nancy signals to turn, even though no one is behind them, and Billy looks at her, with her perfect dress and her perfect curls. “And I really thought I killed her, for a while. I would be lying in bed or sitting in history and I would think to myself, I am a murderer.” Billy stares out the windshield. He thinks he knows how this story ends.

“We’re not the same. You didn’t hit her over the head. You didn’t hold her down while she screamed.” He wants to shock Nancy, to make her shut up. He doesn’t want to hear anything else about her dead friend. But Nancy doesn’t flinch.

“No, we’re not the same. But the world got a little bigger for me that night, and I learned things about myself that I didn’t want to know, not really. And I’m still learning. Like, for example, I’m the kind of person who will shoot a gun point-blank at a guy who sat across the room from her in physics all year.”

“The guy was driving a car toward you at about ninety miles per hour.” They’re almost back at the Byers house, and Billy has never felt so tired in his life. It’s an exhaustion that presses against his eyes from inside his head.

“You were in there the whole time, and I think most of us forgot about that. I honestly don’t know if I cared. I’ve been trying to think about how I can apologize to you, but nothing seems to be enough. When you’re facing death over and over you have to make choices, and one of the choices I made was to decide that you weren’t worth saving. I know you think you need to apologize for what happened, but I think we need to apologize to you. I’m sorry Billy.” They sit in the car outside the Byerses’. Laundry hangs limply on the clotheslines beside them, a woodpecker drills into the front porch, and they both cry.

***

Max meets Will and El at the Hawkins Community Pool. Sometimes they go swimming at Steve’s, but he’s been hanging out with Robin a lot recently, and he’s not at home as much anymore. The hole in the wall of the weight room has been covered with white plastic and tape, and the shattered debris has been cleared away, but more substantial repairs have yet to occur. Recent developments have put a strain on Hawkins’s limited budget, and the evidence of what happened during the first few days of July lingers in plain sight throughout town. Max can’t remember how this bit of damage was explained away. It’s hard to tell so many lies at once.

El stares at the covered hole, wrapping her arms around her body. She’s wearing one of Max’s swimsuits and the sunglasses that she picked out for herself at the mall. Her toes curl in her sandals. Max watches her and wonders what it’s like to know that you’re capable of throwing grown men through concrete walls, or that you once were capable of such a thing. El squeezes her arms and walks away, through the gates and past the bulletin board where a memorial for Heather takes up half the space. Max and Will follow. The three of them sit at the shallow end, dangling their legs in the water and watching parents coax their toddlers into kicking and paddling at the same time. One little boy screams whenever his mother lowers him into the water.

“Not a happy scream,” El decides, and a laugh escapes from Max’s mouth. Will looks between them, a question on his lips, but Max waves him away.

“We’ll explain it when you’re older,” she tells him, and they both laugh with delight at his confusion, at the joy of finding something funny that other people don’t understand. They stay until the pool closes, and although Max treads water for a little while, Will and El don’t venture out any further. El climbs on the back of Will’s bike, and they glide away from Max, coasting down a hill and turning a corner. Max watches them leave before she starts pedaling in the opposite direction. 

It’s been quiet at home since Billy left. Neil and her mom visited her while she was in the hospital, kept there for monitoring like all the other survivors of Starcourt, but Max knows that neither of them went to visit Billy, even though he was there for over a month. His room sits empty, the door unopened since Max and Lucas cleared away his things. Neil never mentions his son, and Max and her mother follow his lead. Neil’s anger lives like a fourth person in the house, and without Billy as its obvious target, it swirls and spirals and lashes out at unexpected moments. His temper arises sudden and furious and retreats just as quickly. Max leans her bike next to the door, careful that the wheel doesn’t stick into the doorway and the handlebars don’t touch the windowsill. Neil likes things to be a certain way, and she knows better than to disrupt his order. He hasn’t touched her or her mother yet, but sometimes it feels like an inevitability. She doesn’t know what her mother would do if Neil hit her, but she remembers them both watching Neil throw Billy to the floor and neither saying a world. Max doesn’t know what she would do if Neil hit her mother. She learned from Billy that the bigger bully wins, but she also learned that there is no standing up to Neil. 

Her mother is making dinner when Max walks in the door, and she asks for help setting the table.

***

A boy crossed paths with a monster, and the boy thought he knew everything there was to know about monsters. The boy thought that nothing could surprise him, that nothing could hurt him that had not hurt him already. The boy was wrong.

***

On the day before the first day of school, Will and El leave the house early, El leaning over Will’s shoulders on his bike, a comfortable position, familiar. Billy eats the scrambled eggs made by Jonathan, and Joyce has a coffee and a cigarette before leaving for work. Billy reads half of the dessert section in Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, changes the sheets on all the beds, including his couch, and washes the old ones. He has a peanut butter sandwich for lunch because the recipes he reads are usually meant to serve at least four. He considers opening a can of beer, but he pours a glass of apple juice instead. He hangs the sheets out to dry, and, noticing that the grass rises past his ankles, he pulls the lawnmower out of the shed. He’s halfway through the front lawn when Murray appears, carrying a toolbox that he uses to take apart the doorbell, which has been broken since before Billy arrived. He talks a lot while he works, but Billy can’t hear him over the roar of the lawnmower, so he nods and gestures with his shoulders and doesn’t say anything. 

After a while, his sweat glues his shirt to his skin, and Billy peels it off. He’s conscious of the scars, dark ridges that run along his shoulders and upper arms, others that are faintly visible through the thin fabric of his tank top. Murray doesn’t make a comment, or change his facial expression in any way, and Billy throws his shirt onto the porch. Jonathan arrives home first, and he sits with Murray while Billy finishes the backyard. Joyce gets home as Billy’s stepping out of the shower, pulling on a long sleeve shirt before he looks in the mirror. Jonathan made ham and green beans and corn, enough for six people, but Will and El still haven’t shown up by the time they finish eating. Joyce takes her cigarette into the backyard again, closely trailed by Murray, who wants to continue an argument about how the windows in the house are too large. Jonathan washes the dishes and Billy dries them, tucking them back into the cupboards. He puts covers over two plates of food to keep them warm and returns to the living room, holding Betty Crocker’s cookbook and staring out the window when a car’s headlights appear down the road. 

The car pulls up behind Joyce’s, and Billy watches Will and El both spill out of the passenger’s side door. They pull Will’s bike out of the backseat, and Billy holds the front door open for them as they race past him to the kitchen, tiny droplets shaking free from their wet hair. Billy stands in the doorway, staring at the car. Its headlights are still on, and he can’t see past them to the driver’s seat, but he knows whose pool Will and El spent the day in. After a moment the headlights flick off, the engine cuts out, and Steve Harrington gets out of the car. 

“Hey,” says Steve. He runs a hand through his hair and leans against the car door. “I keep hearing that you live here now.”

“Yeah,” Billy says, “I do.” He steps onto the porch, letting the door swing shut behind him. The sounds of laughter and clattering utensils disappear, and the hum of insects fills Billy’s ears. “I think I’ve seen everyone else since that night except for you, Harrington.”

Steve shrugs, walking forward. “You haven’t seen Robin,” he says. “I bet you haven’t seen Erica, either.”

“Almost everyone else, then.” Billy sits on the steps. His fingers itch for a cigarette, the first time he’s felt the craving since waking up in the hospital. “Will and El always seem to be at your place.” 

“They’re just using me for my pool.” Steve stops, a foot away from Billy, and rubs one shoe against his calf. Neither one of them looks at the other. “All of those kids just swoop in and out, and there isn’t really anything you can do about it.” Billy laughs, a quiet breath, and wraps his hand around his ankle. He feels small like this, with Harrington standing above him, and he closes his eyes. 

“That night I came here, when you were with all of them. It was one of the other nights when everything happened,” Billy says. He doesn’t open his eyes, but he hears the crunch of gravel and feels the step bend under the weight of Harrington sitting next to him. 

“Yeah. When I came to, Max was driving us to the tunnels. I know all those government people wear full-on hazmat suits when they get near that shit. We had bandanas and goggles.” Billy rests his face in his hands. The details of that night arrange themselves in an incoherent blur.

“So a couple minutes after I beat the shit out of you, you went underground to fight monsters.”

“You didn’t really get me that bad.” Billy opens his eyes, looks at Harrington. “I mean, the adrenaline kicked in pretty quickly, what with the thirteen-year-old driving, so I didn’t even notice the concussion until afterward.”

Billy presses his hands against his forehead. “Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah, well, it sucked, but it’s not like you even looked at me afterward, so. Although, from what I heard, that had more to do with Max than with my stellar performance.” Steve is playing with his shoelace, fraying it between his fingers.

“You weren’t that bad. Pretty good for a guy who had clearly never thrown a punch,” Billy says. Steve straightens, frowning at Billy.

“I was in fights before that.”

“Didn’t seem like it.”

“Well I fought a Russian. Did Dustin tell you that?”

“I thought he was kidding.” Billy pulls on the sleeves of his shirt, suddenly uncertain about what to do with his hands. Steve rolls his eyes, smiling.

“He wasn’t. I took him out, singlehandedly. Then I basically got punched a hundred times with my hands held behind my back, but the first part was still cool.” Billy looks at him, studies the line of his body beneath his clothes, wonders if Harrington is hiding scars, too.

“I heard you had a lot of surgeries?” he asks.

“Yeah. Not as many as you though. It’s not like I went one-on-one with the fucking Mind Flayer.” Billy tries to shrug, but he shivers instead, and he pulls his legs closer to his body. He can feel Harrington’s eyes on him. 

“Can I…” Steve reaches out, then pulls back. It takes Billy a moment to realize what he’s asking for, and then he looks away, ears hot. He lets the silence grow between them until he’s waited for too long, but Steve doesn’t do anything, not moving or speaking. Just waiting. Billy stretches out his hand, palm up, between them. He doesn’t look over, and he jumps at the feeling of Harrington’s fingers, soft, against the scars that splinter outward from the center of his palm.

“Sorry,” Steve says, drawing back, but Billy doesn’t move, and, slowly, Steve reaches up and takes Billy’s hand in his own. “Fuck,” he whispers, rubbing his thumb over the thickest scar, the one that runs along the inside of Billy’s wrist. “I thought I had an intense night.” Billy tries to shrug again, but instead he lifts his other hand, twisting to face Harrington, and reaching out. Steve takes both of Billy’s hands, his smooth skin pressed against Billy’s scars, their fingers interlocked and their wrists brushing. The night deepens around them, a firefly flickers nearby, and they both look down at the point where their bodies meet.

***

A boy crossed paths with a monster, and the monster fought the boy, and the boy fought back.


	2. in flux

A monster walked into a town, and the people who lived in the town had never seen a monster before, but they fought it anyway. They killed it, and afterward they found themselves in a world that was bigger than the world they had known. A man arrived in the town, a man who knew that the world was bigger and who had the ability to clean up the mess that the monster had made. He had a story for all those in the town who had not fought the monster, who did not know that the world was bigger, and he told them this story. Then the man said that he was leaving, that his job was done. Wait, said the people, where are you going? There are monsters in the world. And the man said yes, there are monsters, and there always have been. The man left, and the people looked at one another, because there are monsters in the world, but the evidence had been cleared away, and there was no one to save them from this part. 

***

The morning after Steve Harrington holds Billy Hargrove’s hands and touches his scars, he wakes up in an empty house and calls Robin from the phone in his parents’ bedroom. Her mother answers and reminds Steve that school started today, and Robin’s not home right now. Steve ends the call and stares at the receiver. He knew that today was the first day of school. He doesn’t know how he forgot. 

Steve pours himself a bowl of cereal and turns on the TV because the house is too quiet in the mornings, is almost always too quiet. He sits on the sofa to eat and thinks about Robin, starting her senior year like he did a year ago, knowing about the monsters and knowing very little else. He also thinks about the kids, walking into Hawkins High as students for the first time, the kids who still go biking in the dark, who go looking for the monsters that want to kill them. Steve lives in a house that is too big for three people and definitely too big for just one, but when he starts thinking like this he feels trapped in his own head, and he has to leave. 

The streets of Hawkins are a little quieter today, with no kids chasing each other through front lawns and no teenagers hanging out downtown. Steve drives past Melvald’s, where Joyce Byers is tearing down a sign that advertises the summer sale. Everything twenty-five percent off. Steve rolls past, wondering if he should say something, but Joyce doesn’t turn around, and he keeps driving. He drives until he’s almost outside of town, and then he makes a left. He heads down a long road in the woods and up a gravel driveway to a house that seems empty. He stops the car, turns it off, and thinks about getting out, thinks about leaving, but ultimately just sits there, doing nothing. A shadow moves behind the blinds, and then the front door of the Byers house opens. Billy watches Steve for a moment before walking over. He braces his arms against the top of the car, staring down.

“You lost, Harrington?”

“No.” Steve pushes his sunglasses to the top of his head and looks at Billy’s short hair and his thin face. He’s wearing a shirt with long sleeves like the one he wore last night. Faded red letters read Hawkins Middle School, Class of 1981. Billy pulls his mouth into a line.

“Well then, where are you going?”

Steve shrugs. “Where do you want to go?”

They drive out of Hawkins, heading west. Billy puts his feet on the dashboard and rummages through the debris in Steve’s cupholders, the gum wrappers and bottle caps. He fishes out a condom wrapper, torn open and empty, and tosses it in Steve’s face.

“Who was the girl?” Steve grabs the wrapper from his lap and drops it back into the cupholder, face hot. He flicks his sunglasses down to the bridge of his nose and shakes his head. “Oh, come on, she was from Hawkins, wasn’t she? I’m sure I know her.”

“Whatever, Billy. It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m just curious, Harrington. Was it that Robin chick?

“No. It’s not like that with her.”

“Then who was it?”

“Just leave it alone, Billy, okay?” Billy shrugs and slouches further in his seat. He drums his fingers against his knee. Steve relaxes, thinking that he’s dropped it, and then-

“It wasn’t Nancy Wheeler, was it?”

“No. Jesus, Billy. No.”

“Holy shit, it was. You and Nancy – “

“I said it wasn’t – “

“Behind Jonathan’s back – “

“For fuck’s sake, Billy – “

“For how long? Has it been this whole – “

“It was Heather, okay?” Steve doesn’t mean to yell, but he does, hitting the steering wheel with an open palm and making Billy jump. “It was Heather Holloway, one time, fucking forever ago, like in April or maybe March. Jesus Christ. Are you happy now?” Billy doesn’t answer, and Steve doesn’t look over. He stares at the road so intensely that his vision goes fuzzy. The sound of his own breathing is loud in his ears. They stay like that for five miles, Billy so low in his seat that his head barely clears the window, and Steve clenching the steering wheel until his arms ache. Then, just as Steve is curling his tongue in his mouth, trying to think of an apology, he hears Billy, voice low.

“I’m sorry.” Billy’s staring at his hands, one clenched in the other.

“It’s okay. It’s not like you knew. Sorry for yelling.” Billy shrugs.

“Were you, uh, friends with her?” Billy turns his head so that Steve can’t see his face. Steve sighs, pushing all the breath out of his lungs.

“No. Not really. It was just that one time.” Billy moves his head, a nod or maybe a shrug, and takes his feet off the dashboard.

“I killed her.”

Steve swallows, and the car is quiet enough that he can hear it. He’s never been good at this part, the talking about it part, even now, almost two years after it first happened. “It’s not like it was your fault.” Billy stares at the ceiling of the car.

“I don’t know. I think it probably was kinda my fault. If Heather hadn’t known me, I mean. And her parents. God.” Steve looks at his hands, the tiny scar below the knuckle of his middle finger. Steve knows all about ifs. If he hadn’t slept with Nancy that night, if he hadn’t gone to the Byerses’, if he hadn’t said yes to Dustin, if he hadn’t followed a little girl into an elevator. He doesn’t think that ifs are very helpful. “There’s a woman who lived across the street from us,” Billy says. “Mrs. Orlean. She used to sit on her porch and read, and her grandkids came to visit her a lot. One night, I was getting back late, and my dad came outside, angry, and she told him that I had been helping her replace the light in her bathroom. I don’t know why she lied for me. And then I knocked on her door one day, and she let me into her house, and.” Billy stops, swallowing, staring at nothing. “She was so light, it’s like I wasn’t carrying anything. I remember all of it. I know I deserve it, to remember their faces, but sometimes it’s all I can do. And you know, maybe if Mrs. Orlean never spoke to me, maybe if her face had never been in my head. I don’t know.”

Billy puts his feet back on the dashboard, his arms crossed over his stomach. Steve looks at the black skid marks on the road, the pine trees on either side of it. An image of Billy appears in his mind, partly obscured by the railing that Steve had been crouching behind. Billy, reaching out and screaming, grabbing the Mind Flayer with his bare hands, the Mind Flayer grabbing him back. Steve thinks about the scars on Billy’s hands, how they felt warm in the evening air, how dark they looked against Billy’s pale skin. Steve follows the smooth curve of the road and a diner appears between the trees, an oasis in the desert. There are two cars and a semi-truck outside. Steve signals the turn and pulls off the road, parks. He looks over at Billy.

“Do you want a milkshake?”

Billy orders a vanilla milkshake, Steve gets chocolate and a side of fries. They sit in a tiny booth, Billy looking out the window and Steve pushing his finger through a spot of filmy grease on the table. When the waitress brings their food, Billy sticks the straw into his glass and sucks up the shake, without breathing, until half of it has drained away. He glances up to see Steve staring and looks back down, ears red. Steve clears his throat and unwraps his own straw. He folds the paper into a tiny square. Then he looks at Billy, who is still staring into the depths of his milkshake. “Two years ago,” Steve says, “I went to the Byers house, looking for Nancy, because I had been a real dick to her that day. She was with Jonathan, and she was bleeding.” Billy looks up, and he meets Steve’s eyes. He listens.

***

A monster walked into a boy’s life, and the boy fought the monster. The boy didn’t want to believe in monsters. He didn’t want to believe that his world was bigger than he had thought. But there were other people with the boy, and they helped him fight the monster, and they said to him, that was a monster. The world is bigger than we believed. And the boy said yes, it is, and he opened his eyes and looked around the world and saw things that he had not seen before. When the boy saw things that he did not like, he refused to look away. The boy looked at those things until he understood them because knowledge is its own kind of power, and it gave the boy freedom. This boy did not waste a year loving a girl who did not love him back. 

***

That is the story that Steve wants to be true. It isn’t what happened.

Here’s the truth. When Steve Harrington saw a monster for the first time, he didn’t want to believe in it, and so he forced his life to fit into the same world that he had always known. He thought he was taking control, and he seized his life with his own hands, shaping it within the boundaries that he built, and applying so much pressure, day after day, that eventually it cracked into pieces.

***

Hawkins High School, with its long windowless hallways and lingering scent of artificial cleaners, is a little too much like the laboratory. El sits between Mike and Max in the auditorium during freshman orientation and listens to the balding principal talk about personal responsibility and fresh starts. She and Max exchange a glance. Everyone stares at her on the first day of classes, just like they stared at her during her few months of eighth grade, when she was Jane-who-wants-to-be-called-El Hopper, the short-haired daughter of the police chief that no one had ever seen before. Now she’s Jane-who-wants-to-be-called-El Hopper, whose dad is dead. 

Her biology teacher, Mrs. Hamilton, stops her as she’s leaving at the end of first period and waits for the classroom to empty of lingering students before she tells El that she knows things might be hard for her right now, and that high school can be a tough transition, and that El is welcome to come to her if she ever feels like she’s struggling or falling behind.

“I know that studying might not be your first priority right now,” Mrs. Hamilton says, smiling, “but I believe that you can do well in this class, and I hope that you believe that too.” El imagines sending every poster in this room crashing to the floor. She imagines the desks all rising up and slamming into the ground to carve out a crater in the tiles. Every beaker and test tube shattering, and the windows too, shards of glass floating through the air and slicing through the walls. She imagines Mrs. Hamilton flying into the chalkboard, the sound it would make, how she would scream. She imagines herself screaming, and her fingers flex against her thighs, and nothing happens. She looks at the floor and nods.

School had been scary before, when there were sudden noises and people bumping into her and the horrible possibility that she would make a mistake, slip up, and that everyone would find out about her. Now there is nothing to find out. The sounds of conversations and bells resolve into a hum in El’s ears, and she stares at the wall in every class. They play soccer during gym, and El lingers at the edge of the field, never going close to the ball. 

After school they all go to Dustin’s house, El riding with Mike, who isn’t her boyfriend anymore, but whose smiles can still make her feel warm inside. Sometimes she misses him even when they’re in the same room. Lucas complains about how much geometry homework he has, and Dustin points out that he wouldn’t have any homework if he was in algebra with the rest of them, and soon they’re arguing about nothing. Mike takes his turns much faster than Will, but not as fast as Max, and El closes her eyes, her hands light on Mike’s shoulders, and pretends that she’s flying.

***

When Robin Weaver walks into Starcourt Mall one week before it opens, she takes her resume to Guitar Center. The manager is unpacking a set of amps, and he tells her that yes, he can see that she’s been in band for twelve years, and yes, he can see that she gives music lessons to kids, but no, they’re not hiring teenagers, and no, they’re not making any exceptions. He suggests that she try the food court. Maybe if Robin had walked out of Starcourt on the wave of her self-righteous indignation, she would have thought, like everyone else, that it burned to the ground, the fault of shoddy construction urged on by Mayor Kline’s insistence that Hawkins be the first town in the county to open a shopping mall.

Instead, she walks over to the food court, where the manager of an ice cream store is setting up tables. She arrives on her first day of work to find Steve Harrington standing behind the counter. Steve doesn’t need the money. His dad forced him to get a job in order to teach him a lesson, but Robin needs to start saving for college, and there are only so many middle schoolers in Hawkins who want to learn how to play the oboe. 

It turns out that Steve Harrington is the most entertaining part of her day, with his horde of kid friends and his embarrassingly horrible attempts at picking up girls, all ending in failure now that he’s lost his high school sheen. Scooping strawberry and mint chip cones all day is boring, but Steve is funny, and figuring out the code is interesting, and there are no monsters in Robin’s world, so she follows Steve and two kids into the center of the earth.

Robin and Steve develop a system in the hospital, one in which Robin gives Steve her ice cream and Steve gives Robin his orange juice. They are treated by hospital doctors who know about their injuries and government doctors who know about the Russian drug cocktail injected into their bloodstreams. They drive the nurses on their floor crazy, daring each other into increasingly risky feats to stave off boredom during the day, and sneaking into each other’s rooms at night. Robin’s parents force her to stay at home for a week after she’s released, no visitors, but after that she spends every day with Steve.

Sometimes they want to be around people, so they stay at Robin’s with her three brothers fighting over the Atari and her two dogs tripping over themselves as they compete for Steve’s affection. Sometimes they want to be alone, just the two of them, and they go to Steve’s house, where his mom might be watching something on TV or his dad might be sitting by the pool, but usually his parents are gone and there’s no one to see when all Steve and Robin want to do is lie on the floor in the living room and stare at the ceiling. They only go into town once. Steve’s face still looks like he got stepped on, and everyone stares and asks questions. You were there that night, they say. What was it like? Steve looks away, but Robin meets every person’s eyes.

“I thought we were going to die,” she says, because it’s true, and no one has any questions after that.

Steve never wants to stay in Hawkins for more than a day or two at a time, and so Robin goes with him to Boone County, or Tipton sometimes, and they stop for milkshakes at tiny roadside diners and slushies at 7-Elevens. Sometimes they go to Indianapolis, where Robin lets Steve spend too much money at expensive clothing stores, buying everything that she tries on. When she gets home with the shopping bags, her mother raises an eyebrow and asks Robin if she’s dating that Harrington boy, and Robin shrugs because it’s easier to let people think what they want to believe.

Steve Harrington knows Robin better than anyone else now, better even than Janet and Elise, who visited Robin a few times in the hospital but only wanted to ask about Steve. They think she’s dating him, too, and they ask her about him like he’s Elton John or Prince, and maybe he is to them, the prom king with hair that has been the subject of so many discussions at sleepovers throughout Hawkins. Robin never had much to contribute during those discussions, and now someone knows why, and he hasn’t told anyone, and he talks about girls with her, and the world spins on.

When Janet and Elise ask about Steve, they want to know what his bedroom looks like and if he’s a good kisser. Robin stares at them and thinks about the Steve Harrington they all saw at school and at basketball games, the guy that every girl was in love with, who sat at the back of classrooms and said something charming or funny to the teachers who told him off for talking. She thinks about the Steve that hit a Russian soldier in the face with a phone, who threw fireworks at a monster and told Robin that he had done this all before. There’s no way to tell Janet and Elise about the Steve who lies on his bedroom floor and tells Robin that it took four months to stop feeling like he was in love with Nancy Wheeler, the Steve who shows her the nail-studded bat he keeps in his closet, the Steve who sometimes calls the Weaver house in the middle of the night because he’s alone at home and thought he heard footsteps on the stairs. When Robin thinks about that Steve, she wonders if she’s the person who knows him better than anyone else now, too.

***

A boy walked into a monster’s world and lit it on fire. He returned to his own world, and he was different. He had changed into the person that he’d always wanted to be. The boy understood now which things were important, and he stopped caring about the rest. He knew what he wanted to achieve in his life, and he knew how to achieve it. He never looked back.

***

That didn’t happen either. Steve Harrington left this world and returned to it, different but not changed. He picked up his fears, anxieties, and obsessions, and he found that they fit as well as they had before he left. Steve learned that the world is larger than he imagined, but he went back to Hawkins and he still cared about the things that people said about him. 

Some of it was different after. When the winter froze the brakes on the bikes of the kids who had led him into the other world, Steve gave them rides. He talked to his ex-girlfriend more than he would have if they had not both stared into their own immediate deaths, a possibility waiting for each of them even though they hadn’t yet managed to do anything with their lives.

Steve knew then, that death lives in this world and the other one, but still he needed for people to think that he was cool. The myth of Steve Harrington is that for some people it is easy to be cool, to be an object of worship and adoration. The myth of Steve Harrington is that he would never need to try for anything in his life, but all of it would come to him anyway. The myth of Steve Harrington is not a parable. There is no lesson to be learned.

***

The secret of Steve Harrington is that he never understood why people thought he was cool or how he became popular. He thinks that if he had understood those things, he might not have been so afraid of losing them.

***

Allen Nussbaum, the new editor of The Hawkins Post, calls Jonathan a few days after he gets out of the hospital and asks if he’d like his job back. Tom Holloway might have overreacted a bit when he fired Jonathan, Allen says, and everyone thought that Jonathan had been doing a great job. Jonathan asks if they’re re-hiring Nancy too, and Allen pauses, clears his throat, says something about the position already being filled, about Nancy only being hired on a temporary basis, anyway. Jonathan twists the phone cord around his hand, watches his fingers turn white, and says okay, he’ll take the job. He really does need the money, which is much better than minimum wage, and sometimes financial considerations have to come before moral ones. 

He also starts working at the movie theater on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, and he goes back to his old high school job, at Bradley’s Big Buy, and asks if they need help filling any shifts. He doesn’t tell Nancy about the Post for a week, and when he does it’s as he’s leaving her room, looking at his hands and biting the inside of his cheek.

“Okay,” she says. He glances up at her, sitting cross-legged on her bed, smiling at him. “I get it, alright, and besides, you’re really good at your job, I’m sure they were helpless without you. Just don’t let them be assholes.” Jonathan thinks about the Post’s newsroom, where the men still call the women girls and make comments after a secretary leaves the room, looking at Jonathan like he’s supposed to be in on the joke.

“It pays really well,” he tells her, “and we’re buying food for four people now, maybe five soon, because I think my mom is going to ask Billy Hargrove if he wants to stay with us after he leaves the hospital, and she shouldn’t have to work as much as she does, and also, I’m going to need the references if I ever want to work somewhere that isn’t in Hawkins, and,”

“Jonathan,” Nancy says. “I get it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Thank you for saying that, but don’t be.”

Jonathan pauses, his hands on the doorframe. He needs to go home and make dinner and figure out how to fix the leaky kitchen sink, but he doesn’t know how to leave Nancy, who has soft hands and sweet-smelling hair, who has no one else to talk to about any of this. Nancy and Jonathan killed two men in a hospital, and maybe those men would have killed them first, and maybe those men were already dead, but still Jonathan has to walk past the flowers on Bruce’s empty desk, and listen to plans for an award named after Tom Holloway, to be given to Post reporters for exceptional journalism. Nancy watches him, the sleeves of her sweater pulled down over her hands, and Jonathan listens to the sounds of Mrs. Wheeler and Holly clattering around downstairs.

“Come over to my place for dinner,” he says. “I’ll make the pasta thing that you love.”

***

Robin sits on the floor of Steve’s bedroom, back straight, sheets of music spread out in a semi-circle in front of her, playing the clarinet. She had explained to Steve, a few weeks earlier, the difference between a clarinet and a flute and an oboe, and he watches her now, her hair tied away from her face. She pauses sometimes to make notes with the stub of a pencil that she keeps behind her ear. As she marks the top of a page, Steve pushes himself to his elbows, his bed bouncing lightly with the motion. 

“So, I’ve been hanging out with Billy Hargrove recently,” he says. She looks up at him, and a curly strand of hair escapes the knot on the top of her head, falling into her eyes.

“Yeah? Since when?”

Steve traces the pattern of the bedspread with his finger. “Since school started, I guess.”

“What do you do when you hang out?” Robin sets her clarinet on the carpet and stretches her legs out in front of her.

“What I do with you, mostly. Sometimes we just stay at the Byers house and listen to music.”

“Hm.” Robin pulls at a fraying thread on her jeans and tucks one foot under her thigh. “What’s he like, now?”

“Uh, I don’t know. Quiet, I guess. I’m the one who does most of the talking.” Steve rolls over on his back, his arms lying flat against his stomach. “Is it weird that I’m hanging out with him?”

“Does it feel weird?”

“No. That’s kind of weird though, right? That it feels normal to be around him?”

“I don’t know, Steve. If you like spending time with him, and he likes spending time with you, then who cares if it’s weird?”

“I don’t know what he likes. I can never figure out what he’s thinking.”

“Well that’s good. I hope you would’ve told me if you’d developed mind-reading abilities.” Steve laughs, a short breath. 

“Like there’s anything I can keep from you.” His words hang in the air between them, clinging to soft surfaces before dissipating. Robin sits for a moment without moving, allowing the silence to wrap around them, warm and heavy. Then she picks up her clarinet, finds her place in the music, and starts playing where she had left off.

***

The customers return to Melvald’s now that Starcourt is gone, and Joyce Byers is kept busy with their requests. She restocks shelves, rings people up, and writes down the names of the brands and products that they ask for. Donald grumbles when she shows him her lists.

“Our inventory was good enough for them before,” he says. “If they don’t like it, they can go somewhere else. I’m not changing just because they miss their mall.”

Sometimes Jonathan stops by on his way home from work. She can barely keep track of which job he goes to on any given day. She tries to tell him that he doesn’t need to work so hard, that he doesn’t need to carry their family on his shoulders, but he looks at her with the same eyes of the eight-year-old who had looked at her after his father drove away.

“I’m taking care of it,” he says. “Don’t worry, Mom.”

Will comes by, too, rarely by himself. Joyce never would have imagined that her Will, the quiet little boy who cried at loud noises and spent hours by himself in their backyard, would grow up to have so many friends. Dustin and Lucas push each other into display racks and apologize loudly when they knock the merchandise to the floor and scramble to clean up their mess. Mike and Max are always halfway through an argument when they walk in, and they yell at each other from different aisles as they browse through the shelves. Will always asks if Joyce needs help with anything, and she always says no, and he always helps her anyway. 

El walks down every aisle, picking up each product that Melvald’s sells and turning it over in her hands, reading the labels and asking Joyce about the words she doesn’t know. Sometimes, when the other kids leave, El will stay, sitting behind the counter and working on homework until Joyce closes up at the end of the day. El is always quiet, and Joyce thinks about Hopper, pacing through the store and crumpling a piece of yellow notebook paper in his hands, trying to understand how to talk to his daughter. Sometimes Joyce will tell El about her day, funny stories about customers and whatever new thing annoyed Donald. Sometimes Joyce just turns on the radio, quiet and staticky, and lets them both sit with their own thoughts. 

On most nights they arrive home to Billy making dinner and a random assortment of people in the house. Max likes to sit in the kitchen while Billy cooks, music blasts from Jonathan’s room, and the boys are sprawled around the living room, pretending to do homework or watching TV. Murray drops in and out, making faces whenever the kids try to talk to him but answering their questions anyway. The dinner table is usually crowded and loud, and afterward, when everyone’s departed for their own homes or disappeared quietly into one of the bedrooms, Joyce will shower and walk into her own room, closing the door behind her. She pulls the paperwork from the real estate agent out from under her bed, and she sits in the light of the lamp on her nightstand, looking at pictures of houses in Ohio, Tennessee, and Florida, and thinking.

One day, just after Joyce has opened the store, she’s setting up the register when the bell at the door jingles and two boys walk in. Steve Harrington and Billy, hands in their pockets, their sweeping gazes taking in the fluorescent lighting and linoleum floors. 

“Good morning, boys,” Joyce says. 

“Hi, Mrs. Byers,” Steve says. Billy nods behind him. They walk slowly through the aisles, standing close together, stopping every now and then to look at something. They talk too quietly for Joyce to hear, but Steve laughs and Billy studies the ground, smiling, his ears red. Joyce tries to focus on her own work, but she keeps an eye on the boys, their arms brushing as they murmur into each other’s ears. She straightens up when she notices them approaching, Steve carrying two bags of candy.

She rings them up and Steve pays with a bill that is far too large, dropping the change into the tip jar. “Thanks, Mrs. Byers,” he says, grinning. “See you later.”

“Bye, boys,” she calls after them as they walk out the door. “Bye, Billy.” Billy lifts his hand, waving without turning around. Joyce watches them climb into Steve’s car. The engine rumbles to life, and they pull into the road, windows rolled down, laughing.

***

A monster walked into a boy’s life, and the boy fought the monster, and the monster went away. The boy thought that he had won, he thought that he was done fighting, but then a new monster appeared. This new monster was like the old monster, but it was not quite the same. The boy fought this monster, and he defeated it, and the monster left. Once again, the boy thought that he had won, that his fight was over. Once again, a new monster appeared, similar to the old monsters but not exactly the same. The boy had grown tired of fighting, and he wanted to tell the monster, please leave. You’ve been here already, and I don’t want to do this anymore. But the monster could not speak because it was a monster, and there was only one thing that it knew how to do. So the boy fought the monster, and the boy defeated the monster, and the monster left. This time the boy knew that he had not won, that the fight was not over. Exhaustion clung to the boy, and he didn’t know if he could fight again. He heard footsteps approaching, and, thinking that a new monster had arrived, he did not look up. The footsteps stopped, and a person spoke to him, and the boy looked around and saw that he was surrounded by people. We have also fought the monsters, the people told him. The world is bigger than we thought, and we are in it with you. If the monster comes back, we will fight it again.

***

Robin has the idea, lying on Steve’s couch and reading Jane Eyre while Steve flicks through one of his mom’s magazines. “You should invite some people over,” she says, highlighting a passage at the bottom of the page. Steve stares at her.

“Like a party?” he asks. “I haven’t had one of those in forever, Robin.”

“No, not a party,” she says. “Just a few people. You know. Nancy and Jonathan. And Billy.” Steve holds his tongue between his teeth.

“And what are we supposed to do with Nancy and Jonathan and Billy?” 

“I don’t know. Just hang out. The kids are always together, I see them all the time in the hallways at school. Why aren’t we like that?”

Steve shrugs. “It’s complicated.”

“It doesn’t have to be. Come on, let’s call them.” Robin sits up, reaching for the phone.

“What, like right now?”

“Yeah,” Robin says, already dialing. “What else are you going to do tonight?” Steve watches her call first Nancy and then Jonathan. She makes it clear that Billy is also invited. Then she returns to her book and Steve pretends to read, glancing at the door every few seconds. 

The doorbell rings thirty minutes later, and Steve shoots to his feet, then acts like he hadn’t. Robin gets up, folding the corner of the page to mark her place and glancing at Steve, a smile lingering at the corner of her mouth as she walks to the door. Nancy’s outside, wearing a gray shirt and jeans. 

“You know, when you called me,” she says, stepping inside, “I thought that something had happened. I was ready to run out the door until I actually heard what you were saying.”

“Another reason that we should do this more often,” Robin says, closing the door. “It doesn’t have to be the end of the world for you guys to talk.”

Nancy smiles. “I guess not.”

“Uh, do you want anything to drink?” Steve asks, still standing by the sofa. “I can get you a beer, or soda, or something.”

“I think I remember where the kitchen is,” Nancy says. “I’ll get it myself, don’t worry about it.” Robin follows her down the hallway, leaving Steve to wait by the door.

There’s a knock five minutes later, and this time it’s Jonathan, Billy standing right behind him. When Steve opens the door for them to enter, he sees that Billy’s carrying something wrapped in foil.

“It’s carrot cake,” Billy says in response to Steve’s stare. “Um, it’s what’s left over from last night, so I don’t know if it’s still good or not.”

“You made that?” Steve asks. He can hear his own disbelief. A blush rises high in Billy’s cheeks.

“Yeah, I mean, you don’t have to eat it or anything. I don’t know why I brought it, it was stupid,” he’s saying, drawing back, but then Steve’s taking it from him with a rush of words.

“No, no, that’s great, I mean, I’m sure it’ll be great,” he says. He closes the door with his foot and leads Billy and Jonathan into the kitchen, the back of his neck hot. Nancy and Robin are leaning against the counter, each holding a can of beer. Jonathan walks to Nancy and puts his arm around her waist, taking a sip from her can. Steve watches them, waiting for the familiar squeeze in his stomach and tightness around his throat, but it doesn’t come. Then Robin’s elbowing him in the side and looking up at him, a knowingness in her eyes.

“Come on,” she says, “let’s go outside.” Robin takes a stack of plates and utensils and Steve grabs the case of beer. They arrange themselves on the deck chairs, Nancy with Jonathan, Steve with Robin, and Billy on his own, in the middle. The windows full of yellow light look down on them as they divide the carrot cake onto plates and open up more beers. Steve digs his fork into his slice, crumbs raining onto the plate, and takes a bite. The cream cheese frosting melts over his tongue, and he stares at Billy, who’s looking at his lap.

“Billy,” he says. “Holy shit. This is fucking good.” Billy shrugs and Steve nudges him with his foot. “I’m serious,” he says. “This might be the best carrot cake I’ve ever had.” Everyone else joins in the praise, until Billy is redder than Steve’s ever seen him.

“Thanks,” he mumbles, not looking up, and they move on with the conversation, finishing the cake and licking their forks clean. Robin tells a story about the flute lesson she gave to a sixth grader with horrible dental hygiene last week, which leads to Jonathan talking about catching his brother, Mike, and Dustin trying to sneak into a movie the night before. Then Nancy tells them how Holly cut her own hair with a pair of fabric scissors, requiring an emergency trip to the salon. They’re all still laughing at Nancy’s impression of a frantic Mrs. Wheeler when Billy says, voice low, “I cut my hair when I was a kid.” Everyone turns to stare at him, and he shifts under their collective gaze, not meeting anyone’s eyes, but he continues with the story. By the time he’s finished, Robin is crying from laughter and Jonathan’s spit a mouthful of beer all over the ground. Then Nancy tells them about the time she tried to give her dolls a bath in the sink and ended up the flooding the bathroom. Steve lies back, staring at the dark sky, the wisps of gray clouds, and the pinpricks of stars. He closes his eyes and tries to remember the last time he laughed this much.

He feels something brush his leg and opens his eyes to find Billy picking up the dirty plates.

“Oh, let me do that,” Steve says, but Billy just shrugs and stands, walking back to the house with the stack of dishes. Steve follows him into the kitchen, where Billy turns on the sink. “I can wash those later,” Steve says. Billy shrugs again.

“I don’t mind,” he says, and so Steve grabs a rag out of a drawer, standing at the sink and drying the dishes that Billy hands to him. They work in silence for a few moments, and then Billy says, “Thanks for inviting me.”

“It was Robin’s idea for you all to come over,” Steve says. Billy finishes scrubbing a plate with a sponge and hands it to Steve.

“Still. You didn’t have to ask me to come.” Steve holds the plate without drying it. 

“I know,” he says. “But I wanted you to.” Billy turns and sees Steve staring. His ears go pink, but he doesn’t look away.

“Really?” he asks.

“Of course. We hang out all the time, Billy.”

Billy shrugs, looking somewhere to the left of Steve’s head. “Yeah, but not with other people.”

“Well, I like spending time around you. Alone or not.” Billy meets Steve’s eyes, and they’re standing close enough for Steve to feel Billy’s breath. He can see the tiny bits of blond stubble growing along Billy’s jaw and the faint birthmark just below his eye. He can see a scar, thin and white and almost invisible, on Billy’s cheekbone. Neither one of them moves. “Billy,” Steve says, a question or a statement, he isn’t sure. He inhales and looks down, his eyes tracing the shape of Billy’s mouth. And he kisses him.

It’s just a press of lips, warm and dry, the taste of cream cheese frosting between them. Steve closes his eyes and feels Billy’s hand on his back. He breathes in the smell of him, opens his eyes, and pulls away. Billy is staring at him, not moving.

“Uh,” Steve licks his lips and watches as Billy’s gaze drops to follow the motion. “Was that okay?”

Billy nods, swallows. “Yeah, um. Yeah. Was it okay with you?”

“Yeah.” They stand there, watching each other, until Steve realizes how close they are, still touching, and he takes a step back, laughing at nothing. They finish washing the dishes and go back outside. Steve is sure that the others will take one look at them and know exactly what happened, but Robin is complaining about the calc teacher, Mr. Abramzowski, that Nancy and Jonathan had last year, and the three of them barely glance over as Steve and Billy sit down. Steve stretches his legs out in front of him, and, after a moment, so does Billy. Their ankles brush, the faintest touch of skin, and Steve leans against Robin, resting his head on her shoulder. She’s talking about derivatives, her hair falling across Steve’s face. She smells like beer and shampoo, and Steve inhales deeply. When he closes his eyes, he can remember the feeling of Billy’s mouth against his own. The back of his shirt is damp where Billy grabbed him. He opens his eyes, and he sees Billy staring back at him, a smile pulling at his lips.


End file.
